A new year is upon us – what better time to try something completely different? In the January issue, we’ve done just that: A short story graces our cover for the first time. Here at the View, we are fans of creative writing, and fiction in particular. So when we discovered this bittersweet, coming-of-age story by Assistant Professor of English Nancy Reisman, we thought, “Why not?” Originally published in Five Points, the literary journal of Georgia State University, “No Place More Beautiful” recounts an adolescence tempered by family crisis and a friendship tested by the
predicament of growing up.

story by Nancy Reisman
illustrations by Penelope Dullaghan


Sophie rises in darkness; 12, her body pale curves, she rises only to fall. She’s shaking, her mother is gone – four months dead – the rest of us are just kids. It’s night in a cabin in Northern Ontario. We don’t know what to do when she falls and starts shaking like that, her honey-colored hair in tangles, her face white.

Sophie’s quilt slips off her bed and as the rest of us notice her silence, one by one we hush. Someone snaps on the lights and calls for the night watch counselor; someone else runs down the path to get the doctor, an unnaturally skinny man with blinking eyes and black-framed glasses. He’s awkward, too clumsy to be a real doctor, nonetheless we trust him. We wait, silent, for him to stop Sophie’s shaking. What he does is ready a hypodermic. He asks the counselor to make sure Sophie is as still as possible – hard for anyone to do. Sophie’s like a dog hauled out of North Bay: chilled muscles, chilled lungs, chilled blue map of veins.

We watch from our bunks while he gives her the injection. Our counselor kills the lights and stays there, holding Sophie’s hand until she knows Sophie’s asleep and she’s convinced the rest of us are calm. After an hour, the counselor leaves. She’ll be back – the doctor told her to keep checking on Sophie – but for now she’s on the back steps smoking a cigarette. The cabin is full of sleep breathing, and I whisper to the dark air. Anyone awake? No one answers. I slip out of bed, over to Sophie’s bunk. She’s a small head poking out from a pile of blankets. Perfectly still, lips slightly parted. Sleeping like an ordinary person.

The next day Sophie is excused from all activities, but in the afternoon she and I take showers and sit by the lake and let our hair dry in the breeze. Sophie perched on a rock: small hands, small feet, toes short, almost stubby, but lovely, pink and white, everything about her petite and curvy, everything except the paralyzing grief, the repeating, stricken nights when the world vanishes to her. Then she’s untouchable, even though I want to touch her. In daylight I bring her to the best places I know: the rock jutting from the eastern bank of the lake, a clearing in the birches on the far shore, the fringes of the playing fields, thick with raspberries. At night I bring cool washcloths for her forehead. Watch her.

The watchfulness lasts a couple of years, consecutive summers. Her sadness is a limb, an arm she leans on when she compares clothes with the other girls in the cabin. When they brag about sex, no one pressures her to talk. They can feel the sadness like a radiating wave: She is luminous in all her grief. The boys treat her gingerly, the girls pet her hair and offer to stand watch for her when she smokes cigarettes. I share my candy bars with her and lend her my books. I don’t have clothes to swap, as mine are ordinary – T-shirts and sweatshirts – not the silky stuff the Toronto girls bring. She doesn’t care, she tells me. Before she falls asleep at night, we read books by flashlight on her bed. I stay there until I hear the night watch walking up the path. Once or twice Sophie says, “Becca. Stay,” and I do. The night watch counselor nudges me and points to my empty bunk. After Sophie falls asleep.

Most of the year, we write letters. My mother buys me air mail stamps: Sophie lives in London, Ontario, with her father and her wild older sister, Debbie, the one who painted her own name in huge red letters up on the rafters of three different cabins, the one who was kicked out of camp after a compromising incident behind the woodshop. Debbie and a visiting tennis pro, naked in the storage shed. Or so went the rumor. Sophie and wild Debbie and their businessman father huddle and fight in an oversized house, for a while anyway, until their father remarries a woman with two little girls. Sophie describes the wedding in neat cursive on stationery with butterflies.

My mother reaches through the mess on the kitchen counter – egg shells, vanilla, brown sugar, cellophane bags of chocolate chips – scoops up a fingerful of cookie dough and eats it.

“You’re wrecking my diet,” she says, happy. She licks her index finger.

I’m baking a double batch. “Raisins?”

“Mmm, yes. In half?”

My brother Richie won’t eat raisins. “Right,” I say, and dump half the dough into another bowl.

I’m greasing cookie sheets when the phone rings. My mother picks up, her voice bright: Hi, sweetheart! My sister Laura, calling from college in Wisconsin. But the cheeriness drains away almost immediately. My mother hunches over the phone, curling the cord around her waist. I drop chunks of dough onto the first sheet and pretend not to notice her tightening jawline, her fingers pressed against her lips. Finally she says, “Honey, have you been drinking?” and there’s a burst of sound on the other end of the line, loud static: yelling.

My mother pulls her cardigan tighter across her belly, fills her hands with blue wool. “I see,” she says. “Umm hmm … I’m sorry you feel that way.”

On the message board she scribbles a note, big letters. Points at me. Get Your Father.


Other phone calls follow, most of them muffled – behind the closed door of my parents’ bedroom, from my father’s study. Every time my parents emerge from the study, my mother seems smaller, more condensed, shellacked with worry. Her lipstick wears off. My father pats my head, calling me Rebecca instead of B; he tells me he loves me and wanders away, only to repeat himself an hour later. I bake sheet after sheet of cookie dough and the house fills with a sweet, buttery smell. When I knock on the study door with a plate of cookies, my parents, both of them pale, begin speaking to each other in a code of prepositions and hand gestures, punctuated by the word Madison. In regular English they mention airline tickets, but won’t say more.

“I’m not stupid,” I say. I’m 14.

“We know,” they tell me. “Do you want pizza for dinner? Ask your brother if he wants wings instead.”

My brother and his three best friends are immersed in APBA baseball, their own imaginary league. I bring them cookies without raisins. “Pizza or wings?” I say.

Richie shushes me. He’s recording third-inning statistics. “What?”

“Pizza or wings?”

He closes his eyes and rubs his lips together. “Pizza.”

By dinnertime, my father has left for Wisconsin. The next morning, a woman named Etty shows up at the house in a cream-colored Oldsmobile. She’s wide and copper brown, and the frames of her glasses sparkle along the top. My mother gives her a long list of instructions, tells my brother and me to behave, then drives off to the airport. Etty lights an unfiltered Camel and suggests we go out for brunch.


They’ve gone to help your sister Laura, Etty says in her Oldsmobile, in the Your Host parking lot, in the blue naugahyde booth. In the convenience store, where she buys more Camels, chocolate bars, lemon drops: They’re in Madison with Laura. You like Milky Way? In the living room, during commercials in the Buffalo Sabres/Detroit Red Wings game: They’ll call us later. Only after I ask eight times does Etty let the word “hospital” slip: They’ll call after hospital hours. This narrows the field. Laura’s an artist, a bohemian. I suspect she’s done something artistic and bohemian, like gotten herself pregnant.

“Watch this replay,” Richie says.

“Mmm hmm,” Etty says, “those boys can skate.”


My two closest and only friends from school, Jessie and Abby, speculate about drugs. Bad microdot? Abby says. This is her usual response to mysterious hospitalizations: She’s already experimented her way into an emergency room and had her stomach pumped. Jessie, who is obsessed with mysticism and poetry, asks if I’ve read Carlos Castaneda. She suggests I write about my feelings.

That night, and every night all week, my parents call. Laura is going through an emotional time, they say. They use the words “stress” and “exhaustion.” I’ll be able to talk to her soon, my mother promises. Be patient, my father says. Don’t forget to go to school.

Meanwhile, Richie and I make a string of cards for Laura, his with drawings of dolphins and talking fish, mine collaged from magazines. I send a letter to Sophie, whom I haven’t seen for six months, and at the end of the week, Sophie calls long distance and invites me to London. I picture our lake, Sophie on the rock.

“Ontario?” my distracted parents say. “Good idea, sweetheart.”

Etty makes me pack extra sweaters, counts out $80 from the stash my parents have left, and fills a paper bag with Swiss cheese sandwiches, oranges and Almond Joy bars for the trip.
Southern Ontario spins by beyond the dirty bus window – an hour to go before the train station and my connection to London. I work over the Laura clues: Stress. Exhaustion. Fainting spells. Anemia, I think. Emotional time. Hysteria. Sedatives. I start another card, this one store-bought and pink, covered with roses, “Get Well Soon” in elegant script. The bus jiggles and lurches, my handwriting alternately lumping up and skidding like cartoon volts. I draw stick-like daisies around the roses, a stick figure version of myself in high-top sneakers, a dialogue bubble surrounding “Get Well Soon.” The bus makes a stop. I write knock-knock jokes in the card’s corners. A broad man-boy in a lumber jacket appears, enormous, and drops his cap on the seat next to me.

“OK if I sit here? Nice card,” he says, and eyes my drawing. His body bulges over the edges of his seat, onto mine. The bus starts back on the road. “Someone sick?” he says. I nod. He comments on the passing scenery, tells me he lives in Peterborough, asks me where I’m going. “London, is that right? I’m going there too.” He knows the area like the back of his hand, he tells me. His hands are sausagy and rough and after a while he picked up one of my hands in his.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Can I hold your hand for a little while?” he says. “You don’t mind if I hold your hand, do you?”

I don’t answer. But he touches my palm anyway, says my hands are little and soft, so nice, such soft little hands. I turn my head and gaze out the window; when he pauses for a moment I pull my hand away, pretending to sweep hair out of my eyes. Then I keep my hand hidden away from him.

“Don’t you want to talk to me anymore?” he says. “I thought you liked me.”

“I just want to look out the window.”

“Listen,” he says, “Don’t waste your money on the train. I’ll get you where you need to go.” He’s going to hitch from the train station, he tells me, it’s much cheaper. I should hitch with him. “I’ll get you where you need to go,” he says. “I’ll get you there fine.” After all, he’s a standup guy. There’s nothing to worry about, not a thing.

“I already have my ticket,” I say. Lying, which Laura would call “bad karma.”

“You could cash it in.”

I pull my down jacket tighter around me and stare at the chipped yellow road lines. Finally he gives up. When the bus stops, he lets me get off ahead of him and I run to the Canadian Railway information booth. For a few minutes he stands on the bus platform, watching me, his army duffle as thick-bodied as he is. I move on to buy my ticket and when I glance back, he’s melted off into the crowd.